Plex servers users where do you backup your content to?

[GazCBG]

Hi,

 

So those with Plex servers, where do you backup your content to.

Do you use Local, Remote or both?

 

Thanks

Gaz

 

[DezGalbie]

49 minutes ago, GazCBG said:

Hi,

 

So those with Plex servers, where do you backup your content to.

Do you use Local, Remote or both?

 

Thanks

Gaz

 

At the moment my backups are done by connecting an HDD docking station and copying the content over onto my backup drives. The backup drives are then disconnected and put back on a shelf until the next backup.

I've mentally gone back and forth in my mind about whether to do it a different way, but that's the current system anyway.

[SimssmiS]

Short answer: I don't
 

I've got parity preventing some data loss but no real Backup... honestly losing my movies is not that big of a deal for me since I don't see it as critical content. Backing up 9tb of Data would be pretty pricy no matter if I keep it off or on site.

[paddy-stone]

For the plex media videos/music I backup to my second NAS (first one is down for rebuilding purposes), and also more essential videos are backed up to an external USB too, just because the NAS doesn't have parity right now, so could at some point be needed, if the worst were to happen. I'm not entirely taken with the NEED for parity anyway really, as my 2nd NAS and backups are always to hand if I needed something and the NAS array had failed (My PC for now). I'm unsure if (at the moment at least) whether the rebuild time would actually take longer than to upload the data again from my backups on the 2nd NAS system.

IMO it all comes down to how much time it would take you to re-acquire the media... for me it would take a long time to re-rip my blu-rays and encode them to my taste, I don't like having most of my media at BD size as it's not needed in most cases... for my 4k BDs I have them at original quality as they are played back on the 4k TV and I mostly only buy action, and other movies that IMO benefit from the high bitrate of 4k BD. So it's worth it to me to have a 4TB drive or 2 for those backup purposes. They only get backed up when new content is added anyway, the rest of the time they are cold storage... so it could be a number of years before they need replacing.

Even if everything was to fail, I still have backups of my more essential files (non-media)... and the media can be re-acquired. If it was the ONLY copy of home movies or content, then it might be more valuable to have a very good mirror/parity or combo of some sort. I haven't lost anything important to me for a number of years now, even before I had a NAS at all, as I learned from mistakes made in the 90s and early 2000s to always have backups. Of course it's also much more handy now there are lots of online backup solutions and internet speeds are at a reasonable level to take advantage of those now.

[WereCatf]

I have 10TB of stuff, I have nowhere to backup so much.

[DezGalbie]

33 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I have 10TB of stuff, I have nowhere to backup so much.

I have a bit more than 10tb and I just back up to other drives.
 

I find that the key is having the discipline to only ever expand my storage when I can afford 2 new drives, not just 1. The first expands my regular storage and the second is added to the fleet of backups for straight 1:1 backing up. (I haven't experimented with RAID arrays yet.)

[LordMustangGT]

currently have 4 3tb drives in a raid 5 for my main archive, then I use a single 8tb red for backing everthing up local. Both are in the same computer too right now.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

7 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

At the moment my backups are done by connecting an HDD docking station and copying the content over onto my backup drives. The backup drives are then disconnected and put back on a shelf until the next backup.

I've mentally gone back and forth in my mind about whether to do it a different way, but that's the current system anyway.

The system you have right now is one of the best. The only improvement I could suggest is, in addition to the set of backup drives you have now, have a second set you keep offsite somewhere (I keep my offsite backup drives in my safe deposit box at my credit union) and swap the onsite and offsite backups drives as often as practical.

 

It's also a good idea to connect and power up your backup drives briefly if there has a been more than a few months since you lasted updated your backups to make sure the drives are still working correctly. I run my backup program (FreeFileSync) no less than once a month, whether my backups need updating or not, to force the computer to read all the files to ensure none have gone bad. It doesn't take me very long and I have five 4TB data drives to keep backed up and updated (OK, they are SSDs but even HDDs would take all that long).

[Lady Fitzgerald]

6 hours ago, SimssmiS said:

Short answer: I don't
 

I've got parity preventing some data loss but no real Backup... honestly losing my movies is not that big of a deal for me since I don't see it as critical content. Backing up 9tb of Data would be pretty pricy no matter if I keep it off or on site.

Forgive my curiosity (and that is all it is: I'm not trying to be sarcastic) but, if you were to lose all your content, how longwould it take and how much would it cost to replace all that content if you don't have backups? (And if you just wouldn't care if you never recovered the content, that is a perfectly good answer. Not everyone has the same priorities).

[GazCBG]

The reason I ask, is I have around 3-4TB at the mo but growing and to replace would take hours, if not a day.

I currently have it backed up on to a 4TB external hard drive and was thinking something offsite, that I can get quickly if needed.

My current ISP package give me about 400Mb download speed, so I was thinking maybe backup to a server somewhere in UK or Europe and encrpyt the directory the files was in just incase.

 

[WereCatf]

4 hours ago, DezGalbie said:

I have a bit more than 10tb and I just back up to other drives.
 

I find that the key is having the discipline to only ever expand my storage when I can afford 2 new drives, not just 1. The first expands my regular storage and the second is added to the fleet of backups for straight 1:1 backing up. (I haven't experimented with RAID arrays yet.)

I can't afford such a scheme. That said, I do have a RAID5-setup, so I am protected against a single drive failing. Also, I don't consider the Plex-stuff critical -- it's just movies and TV-shows -- so I would be upset if I lost it all, but it wouldn't be the end of the world. It'd take some weeks and effort to replace the stuff, but oh well.

 

All the stuff I consider critical ain't files that Plex can handle in the first place, they're on RAID1 and I've set them up to be synced to a backup-server once week that's also using RAID1, so they're fine. As another precaution, the backup-server is off most of the time, the main-server wakes it up via WOL when it's time to sync, and then the backup-server goes back down again -- if something malicious got on my network and started deleting files, it'd have to know to wake the backup-server up to access it, too.

[DezGalbie]

17 hours ago, WereCatf said:

I can't afford such a scheme.

 

You really can though. If you can afford 10tb worth of storage space then you can afford 5tb of storage space plus 5tb of backup storage space instead.

The scheme suggested involves growing your backup storage at the same rate as you have done your regular storage. It would not have cost you any more to have done that, it just would have limited the rate at which you amassed all this "non-critical" data by slowing down the expansion of your regular storage space. With it being non-critical data then there's really no issue with limiting the rate at which you accumulate it, is there?

You're saying that you can afford to lose the data because it's non-critical, but that you can't afford to have an equal amount of storage space and backup storage space.

Well if you can afford to lose the data then delete half of it. Suddenly you have equal amounts storage and backup storage space and it never cost you a penny. By doing something you could afford you suddenly have been gifted with something you thought you couldn't afford. Seems like a tremendous value proposition!

You're welcome.

[Xplo1t]

I don't bother backing up the movie/video portion of my Plex environment.  Everything else is backed up to the cloud + local + HDD is a safety deposit box.  It's just under 3TB of stuff that I don't want to lose.  

 

 

[Mikensan]

On 2/23/2019 at 7:55 AM, DezGalbie said:

You really can though. If you can afford 10tb worth of storage space then you can afford 5tb of storage space plus 5tb of backup storage space instead.

The scheme suggested involves growing your backup storage at the same rate as you have done your regular storage. It would not have cost you any more to have done that, it just would have limited the rate at which you amassed all this "non-critical" data by slowing down the expansion of your regular storage space. With it being non-critical data then there's really no issue with limiting the rate at which you accumulate it, is there?

You're saying that you can afford to lose the data because it's non-critical, but that you can't afford to have an equal amount of storage space and backup storage space.

Well if you can afford to lose the data then delete half of it. Suddenly you have equal amounts storage and backup storage space and it never cost you a penny. By doing something you could afford you suddenly have been gifted with something you thought you couldn't afford. Seems like a tremendous value proposition!

You're welcome.

 

He's talking about media, so I'm assuming what you're saying is tongue in cheek? Because Media can be recovered very easily, means you do not need to waste money on disks to back it up. Unless it is something you would have to sit down and recreate yourself from memory, there's little point to backing up recoverable/recreatable data.

 

I'm sure I'm not speaking for only myself, but my media can be recovered with very little effort and without me sitting there - so it doesn't even cost me personal time.

 

So if you really must have your media within 24-48 hours then feel free to spend the money on 1:1 storage:backup. Otherwise people like @WereCatf and myself don't mind waiting until the end of the week to have our media back. 

 

@GazCBG - One method some people do is look for unlimited cloud storage for their large data backups. Lot of the time new startups will offer this with the caveat that upload speeds slow down when a daily/monthly quota has been met. Somehwere in these forums or maybe you can search reddit - google's business accounts have "unlimited" with the same stipulation (I think even Linus attempted to push his data to Google). One other alternative is to just buy a single external 2x the size of your current library and push backups to that. Once it is full label it with a unique number (001) then in a spreadsheet label the worksheet 001 and list out all the movies on it, buy another external and label it 002. There are powershell scripts that'll dump out file names to help you transpose what is in your directory(s) to the spreadsheet.

[Lady Fitzgerald]

Deleted by poster.

[DezGalbie]

7 hours ago, Mikensan said:

He's talking about media, so I'm assuming what you're saying is tongue in cheek? Because Media can be recovered very easily, means you do not need to waste money on disks to back it up. Unless it is something you would have to sit down and recreate yourself from memory, there's little point to backing up recoverable/recreatable data.

 

I'm sure I'm not speaking for only myself, but my media can be recovered with very little effort and without me sitting there - so it doesn't even cost me personal time.

 

So if you really must have your media within 24-48 hours then feel free to spend the money on 1:1 storage:backup. Otherwise people like @WereCatf and myself don't mind waiting until the end of the week to have our media back. 

3

Yeah, he's talking about media. So am I.

How would you possibly get all your media back by "the end of the week", and in a way that "doesn't even cost you personal time" without having backups?

It has cost me many, many hours of personal time to build up my Plex library to where it is today - about 14tb of movies and TV shows. If this disappeared overnight (and I didn't have the data backed up) then it would take me a long time and a lot of effort to search for downloads, rip discs, encode files etc to get me back to here.

My backup drives cost me about £150. Given that they save me from literally weeks of work when my drives fail, that is most certainly not a "waste of money". How highly do you value your time? Costing me what they have, as long as my backup drives are saving me from at least 20 hours of work then I see it as good value for money. There is no chance I could get my Plex library back with 20 hours of work.

Hell, even having the data backed up on backup drives, it would take a full day to copy all that data back over to my server if it all disappeared from there overnight. To individually source, rip, and encode 14tb worth of files which are around 2-3gb on average each is a huge task.

[Mikensan]

@Lady Fitzgerald You are absolutely correct, in your scenario I would see value in at the very least backing up to externals with some form of index as I suggested to the OP. 

 

@DezGalbie If it actually costs you time, regardless of what it is, then you would not define it as "non-critical" correct? You made light of another person's scenario while applying your own situation to them. I countered that some people can easily recover their media, and you seem upset. 

 

The whole point I was trying to make is you only back up things you could never recover or that may cost you time (be it manually recreating or having to sit down for hours). For me personally, my 8TB of media might cost me a few hours of searching - the rest of the week I would simply occupy my time with other things. 

 

Also I would argue anything further than OP considering the value/time of the data he wishes to backup before investing money would be off-topic. So I'll end my argument in hopes you understand not everyone has the same constraints as you.

[DezGalbie]

17 hours ago, Mikensan said:

 

@DezGalbie If it actually costs you time, regardless of what it is, then you would not define it as "non-critical" correct? You made light of another person's scenario while applying your own situation to them. I countered that some people can easily recover their media, and you seem upset. 

 

The whole point I was trying to make is you only back up things you could never recover or that may cost you time (be it manually recreating or having to sit down for hours). For me personally, my 8TB of media might cost me a few hours of searching - the rest of the week I would simply occupy my time with other things. 

 

Also I would argue anything further than OP considering the value/time of the data he wishes to backup before investing money would be off-topic. So I'll end my argument in hopes you understand not everyone has the same constraints as you.

 

Firstly, it's important to make clear that I'm not upset in the slightest. I really don't know where that idea has come from, but I'm happy to say that you're mistaken there. This is a conversation about spinning metal disks encoded with ones and zeroes which make cartoon characters appear on my TV. It's not that serious.

Secondly, it was not me who defined the data as "non-critical", hence my use of quotation marks to show that I am using a definition offered by someone else which I may or may not agree with. It is in fact down to the individual to decide what is critical and what is not based upon their own situation, methods, and uses for their data.

Thirdly, I did not "make light of another person's scenario while applying my own situation to them". I spoke about how this other person's situation could be improved based upon the particulars of their situation. E.G. He said that he could not afford backup storage so I worked on that premise to show how he could have backup storage without costing him any money. He regarded his media as "non-critical" so I suggested a solution which involved treating his media as "non-critical" etc. This all came from what he told me about his situation. You may choose to take my suggestion as "making light" but what makes it so? If the data is non-critical, and this person believes that they cannot afford backup storage, then my suggestion is perfectly valid.

Fourthly, you previously said that you could recover your media without costing you any personal time. I questioned this because it seemed pretty unbelievable. You now say that it would in fact cost you "a few hours". Which is it? You did not just counter that "some people can easily recover their data". That is of course true. It will vary from person to person depending upon the amount and type of data they keep. You countered that your media could be recovered "without even costing you personal time". It was this strange claim that I questioned, and not because I was upset, but because it makes no sense.

Fifthly, absolutely, not everyone has the same constraints as me. Everyone will be different. I'll refer you back to "Secondly" and "Thirdly" above. I made suggestions based upon what I was told about another person's situation, not based upon my situation.

[Doyniish]

Has anyone tried uploading their backup to an AWS S3 bucket?

[GazCBG]

On 2/27/2019 at 1:21 PM, Doyniish said:

Has anyone tried uploading their backup to an AWS S3 bucket?

If you go this route be sure to check how much it could cost.

AWS has a calculator to work out how much it would be.